Bacon - The Art of Community

Copyright 2012 Jono Bacon

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When Im not running Wired , I run a community called DIY Drones . Here more than 20,000 members collaborate to make open source unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), which are essentially fully autonomous airplanes, helicopters, and other things with spinning propellers that fly all by themselves.

The DIY Drones community has created countless products, but the most successful is ArduPilot, a series of autopilots based on the Arduino computing platform. Were part of the Open Hardware movement, which is to say that there is both a software and a hardware element to the autopilots our community creates, and both are open source. Although I and others also have commercial companies that make and sell this hardware (mine is called 3D Robotics), under the terms of the open source license, anybody, absolutely anybody, can use the designs our community creates and make them to compete with us. It may sound crazy, but such openness can create innovations faster, cheaper, and better than traditional closed source research and design in regular companies. The only risk is that some other company will clone the product and sell it for less, fully within the legal terms of the license.

This is exactly what happened in late 2010. We got word that Chinese copies of our ArduPilot Mega design were for sale on Taobao, eBay, and other online marketplaces. And indeed they werewell-produced, fully functional clones. Not only that, but our English instruction manual had been translated into Chinese, too, along with some of the software.

Our community members reported this blatant piracy and asked what we were going to do about it.

Nothing, I said:

This is both expected and encouraged in open source hardware. Software, which costs nothing to distribute, is free. Hardware, which is expensive to make, is priced at the minimum necessary to ensure the healthy growth of a sustainable business to ensure quality, support, and availability of the products, but the designs are given away free, too. All intellectual property is open, so the community can use it, improve it, make their own variants, etc.

The possibility that others would clone the products is built into the model. Its specifically allowed by our open source license. Ideally, people would change/improve the products ("derivative designs") to address market needs that they perceive and we have not addressed. Thats the sort of innovation that open source is designed to promote. But if they only clone the products and sell them at lower prices, thats okay, too. The marketplace will decide.

BTW, the Arduino development boards have gone through exactly the same situation, with many Chinese cloners. The clones were sometimes of lower quality, but even when they were good, most people continued to support the official Arduino products and the developers that created them. Today, clones have a small share of the market, mostly in very price-sensitive markets such as China. And frankly, being able to reach a lower-price market is a form of innovation, too, and that is no bad thing.